Leonard C Suskin's musings on writing, parenthood, and the wonderful world of commercial AV.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

K is for Knowledge Base

I started in the commercial AV industry not that many years ago, and had to start off learning some of the industry's basic knowledge. The industry 's professional organization, Infocomm (no relation, alas, to the computer game company) gives a "Certified Technical Specialist" certification to those who have shown basic knowledge of at leas the language of AV. Later, there are CTS-D (Designer) and -I (installer) designations for those who have achieved a higher level of accomplishment. What occurred to me recently, in that getting the basic CTS required me to know about:

Analog video encoding

RGBHV

RGBS

RGsB

YC (S-video)

Composite Video

Analog audio

Balanced and unbalanced signals

Types of microphones

Types of loudspeaker systems

Basic environmental factors

Appropriate displays for various scenarios

Aspect ratios

Cabling and connectors

Coaxial

Twisted pair

structured cable (shielded or unshielded twisted pair; ie, Cat5/5e/6)

Connectors

BNC

RCA

RJ45

XLR

HD15

DB9

There was more, but those were some high points that I remember. Some of this still fits; a loudspeaker is still a loudspeaker, and balanced audio is still usually connected to a 3-pin XLR the same way (1 is shield, 2 is hot, three is negative). S-Videoand component video, however, seem all but gone from professional installations. If I were building a knowledge base today (and I am, every day), I'd include:

Digital Video

TMDS (DVI and HDMI)

Mini-packet (Displayport)

Data Networks

address layers

Firewalls and other security concerns

Digital audio

SPIDF

Cobranet

AVB

Fiber transmission

Singlemode

multimode

The more interesting question is how this list would look tomorrow. What are we learning now that will soon be obsolete, and what is lurking on the horizon which will become a core skill.